my mind on books

Found via Lifehacker: BookLamp is developing a book recommendation system based on stylistic characteristics such as pacing and density, attempting to analyze books in the way Pandora does music. They have a very limited database of around 170 (mostly science fiction) books, so at this point it’s just a demo of the concept; it seemed to me that the video actually gives a better idea than the site itself. The site also has a forum to solicit reactions and suggestions for the project.

LibraryThing has a “tagmash” function that is a good way to search for books at the intersection of two or more terms. You don’t have to be registered to use the search function, and combining tags will locate books in people’s personal libraries that they have labeled with (both/all) the search terms.

Here is an example, books tagged “consciousness” and “science fiction”, which at this time gives 64 results. Along the side there are also some “related tagmashes” offered, such as “consciousness, fiction” or “philosophy, science fiction.”

I’ve tried the Amazon new book feed mash in Fwicki: link to the feed. It has several of the mind-related categories in Amazon’s ‘hot new releases’ section merged into one feed. The feed works just fine but a “reader” page at Fwicki had to be taken down because of some problem with the way the Amazon feed was formatted.

The FeedBlendr mash from episode 1 did not work too well when inserted right into the post, so I won’t link back to it, but FeedBlendr did make a nice webpage for the feed. I like this page because you can go back through a link at the bottom of the page and browse through many pages of books, instead of just seeing the ones that happen to come up on top.[I’ve changed the link to open in a new browser in case it is slow to load.]

ReadMe is a MetaFilter Wiki page collecting (and organizing) all the book-related topics from Ask MetaFilter, usually book recommendations on specific topics.

For example, filed on the wiki under “Science & Math: consciousness” – there are two entries: 1 (“recommend books about consciousness”) and 2 (“what to read after Dennett’s Consciousness Explained?”)

Also “recent books on cognitive science”

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Another good source of book lists is the site Lists of Bests, where I found “Mindpapers: 100 most cited works in the Philosophy of Mind”.

iResearch Reporter is a search engine that extracts text to provide a summary of search results – something interesting to play with.

Found via Pandia Search Engine News.

[I’m back from my trip & resuming (relatively) regular posting.]